"Just City provides a deep and thoroughly contextualized understanding of subsidized housing for the middle- and lower-class in postwar Manhattan: the goals that brought politicians to create it; its actual development on the streets of New York; its rise and fall in popularity; and the broader state of mind that made such widespread urban policies possible. The book is a fascinating combination of memoir and urban studies." - Jennifer A. Low, professor emerita at Florida Atlantic University and author of Dramatic Spaces: Scenography and Spectatorial Perceptions "Mitchell Lama housing was always more than low-cost apartments in tower blocks. For many sponsors and residents, cooperation and mutual aid were just as important as shelter. Jennifer Baum captures that broader spirit in this readable autobiographical account, integrating personal memoir and housing policy analysis. For a rising generation excited about housing cooperation, Baum's vivid description of the promise and challenge of earlier efforts is instructive." - Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Hunter College, City University of New York "In Just City Jenny Baum has achieved something memorable: she has excavated her own specifically etched memories of growing up in the subsidized housing of Manhattan's Upper West Side and allowed them to open up into a broad and deeply researched exploration of this remarkable urban experiment.

This perspicacious book speaks as much to New York of the 1970s as it does to modern America as it invites all of us city dwellers to look back to our points of origin and ahead to the kinds of cities we might long for--and work to bring about--in the future." - Michael Frank, author of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World "Jennifer Baum's Just City conjures up a vivid not-so-distant past where working- and middle-class families of all races shared a landscape of collective vision, common good values and abundant social capital before the forces of privatization and gentrification consumed most of the Upper West Side. Baum's family, friends and neighbors live again in this historical memoir, showcasing marvelous and surprising ways Urban Renewal and public policy worked as a tool for building an urban middle class in the second half of the 20th Century, with Mitchell-Lama housing anchoring a diverse neighborhood where both grit and glamour flourished." - Gregory Jost, Writer & Speaker, Inside the Redlines.